HostGator vs DreamHost

HostGator (review) and DreamHost (review) are among two of the most popular shared web hosting companies. They are both well established companies with excellent reputations. The companies are pretty close in size (about 150 at HostGator, 70 employees at DreamHost) and host a comparable amount of domains (700,000 at HostGator, 500,000 at DreamHost).

HostGator and DreamHost have slightly different company cultures. A review of HostGator.com’s web site reveals it’s personal and informative approach. The HostGator web site doesn’t venture into humor or carefree talk. HostGator.com has few jokes. On the other hand, DreamHost likes to laugh at itself and sports a web site that contains obvious jokes and light hearted comments among more serious information. Some web hosting customers like the jokes, others don’t. Both web hosting companies, though, are highly technical and know when to take their work seriously.

HostGator’s shared hosting plans are competitively priced and offer a lot of space and bandwidth. Dreamhost has always offered vastly oversold (they admit it) and very generous plans. The entry level plan offers 500 GB of disk space and 5 TB of monthly bandwidth. Both numbers increase by the gigabytes each week. Both companies include plenty of email accounts, databases, etc with all of their plans.

DreamHost’s cheapest plan will cost you $7.95 per month if you pay for three years in advance. HostGator’s cheapest shared hosting plan is $4.95 per month if you pay three years in advance. HostGator’s next plan up (the Baby plan) offers more space and bandwidth than DreamHost’s comparably priced plan, but does not increase weekly.

Both web hosts offer lengthy money back guarantees. HostGator’s is 45 days. DreamHost’s money back guarantee period is 97 days.

It is important to note that HostGator uses cPanel exclusively whereas DreamHost uses a custom control panel. DreamHost’s control panel offers all of the expected features and is very powerful, but it is not cPanel. If you have a particular affinity for cPanel, DreamHost won’t be the choice for you.

As far as customer support goes, HostGator provides more options. All of HostGator’s plans come with unlimited, toll free phone support. DreamHost only offers 3 call backs per month for an extra $9.95 per month. HostGator also offers 24/7 live chat, which DreamHost does not. Both companies have active communities forums and extensive knowledge bases (a wiki in DreamHost’s case). Both companies provide 24/7 email support, though. At DreamHost, you have to be logged into to your control panel to send in a ticket. While it is purely a personal pet peeve, DreamHost does not publish its office address (they publish a PO Box).

Which web host you go with is entirely up to you. As always, spend time researching both companies. Since both companies have such generous money back guarantees, you can even give them a try and see which one you prefer.

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I am using dreamhost for 2 years now and it’s really fast compared to my previous plans (bluehost.com and powweb.com). It kills them in speed. However, dreamhost tends to have speed issues in mysql I think.

I’m pretty happy with dreamhost overall. But wish performance was better in mysql.

If you take under consideration that Hostgator has many more clients than Dreamhost, then you can see that the numbers talk for themselves.

But besides numbers… I’ve been a dreamhost customer for 5 years and I was always tolerant to their delays in providing support, their downtimes, their slow servers but I had enough and I moved to hostgator.

Dreamhost customer for over 5 years. I also have clients on Host Gator. cPanel sucks in comparison to Dreamhost’s panel.

Google searches, as mentioned above, are a terrible way to determine who is good. The best part is both have a money back guarantee. Try them both, and choose what you enjoy.

As for me, Dreamhost it will be. I recently upgraded from oversold, shared Dreamhost hosting to Dreamhost PS (private server) and it is absolute bliss. I tend to enjoy their humor, too, and their support has been excellent – I have only used email/support tickets.

I don’t understand why none of these comparative reviews don’t say anything about server performance. You would think this is quite important, no?
How many sites are hosted on one server? How does rich media perform on the servers?

I’ve a site crickethighlights.org which was running with hostgator. My only problem with them is that their servers couldnt handle high traffic spikes sometimes. Anyway, I’ll vote for hostgator all the time.

For mid-range websites that are not business mission critical (churches, clubs, personal/family), I’m not sure you can beat Dreamhost. It helps to know what you’re doing, but their custom panel should be a big help to someone that doesn’t.

I recently dumped 1and1 for Dreamhost (note: 1and1 doesn’t make that easy). Main reason was that Dreamhost can handle TYPO3 on shared hosting and 1and1 can’t. Once I switched, I wished I had found Dreamhost a lot sooner.

In terms of hosting providers, I have experience with HostGator, Dreamhost, and Bluehost.

I had a site that was on HostGator shared hosting and didn’t have too many issues. It went down once or twice over a six month period.

I have 2 sites on Dreamhost VPS and Dreamhost has been more like a nightmare than a Dream. Things weren’t too bad until I started getting server overloads on their shared hosting. I had 2 blog sites with fairly little traffic at the time (combined less than 30k monthly page views).

They pushed me to their VPS service and I’m paying about $25 per month to host 2 sites that only get maybe 60k total monthly page views which is not great value for that amount of traffic. I’ve moved servers 4 times and been down twice per week or more since upgrading to their VPS.

I have a site on Bluehost shared that runs faster than Dreamhost VPS by Pingdom (same theme/plugins) and it’s never gone down ever.

Once I figure out how to switch which is harder since Dreamhost doesn’t use Cpanel, I’m gone.